Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

The prospects of surviving any serious illness are, self-evidently, improved if it is caught early. Hence Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s commitment last week to recruit 500 more radiologists and endoscopists to speed up the investigation of patients suspected of having cancer. This is particularly welcome as, regrettably, many of the new and costly anti-cancer drugs are only modestly effective, if at all, in improving the outcome of those with later stages of the disease.

Thus, a recent analysis of 68 chemo drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency, the regulatory body, found that five years on, just 15 per cent had been shown to confer any “clinically meaningful benefits”.